Now the design of most modern warship doesn’t just concentrate on dealing out damage, but also on taking a hit. Use to be that ships of equal weight classes would pound each other, sometimes for hours, before there was a clear winner. That winner would then go about repairing as much damage as possible so it could be ready for the next fight. Torpedoes made it possible for smaller ships to sink larger until some defenses, like fast firing guns and protective bulges were added to the ships. Then aircraft started dropping bombs that could penetrate armor, and massed of antiaircraft guns were added to ships to shoot the little pests down before they could drop a 2,000 pound bomb down the stacks. Then along came nuclear weapons and armor was considered obsolete, even though the Bikini Atoll tests showed it really wasn’t. Now ships depend on electronic systems, countermeasures, fast firing gun systems and counter missiles to defend themselves. And almost no armor, even though modern warships have yet to face nuclear weapons, and instead face systems that take advantage of the lack of armor. The captain of the BB Iowa was once asked how he would handle an attack by an Exocet missile. His reply was that he would scrap the hull where it hit and repaint it. And Exocet is no threat to a ship with sixteen inch armor plate.

So how will ships in space defend themselves against attack? A force field? While they are cool to imagine, we’re not even sure that the force fields of Star Trek and Star Wars are possible. After all, we only know of four basic forces in the Universe; Gravity, Electromagnetism, and the Strong and Weak Nuclear Forces, and none of them lend themselves to the creation of the standard scifi screen of force. Someday we mat be able to manipulate gravity, which might lend itself to a gravitic force shield (and don’t ask me how that might manifest itself). But we already know that a electromagnetic field could be used to offer some protection. We are already experimenting with light bending, and an electromagnetic field could be used to bend light. How is this useful? Well, let’s say someone is firing a laser beam at our ship. It’s pentajoules of energy coming in on a couple of meter thick beam, striking the surface of the ship and imparting huge amounts of heat energy across a small area. But with an electromag light bending field in place the beam might be expanded to cover a hundred square meters of hull versus less than four. Still a lot of energy coming in, but over a larger area, so the area damage is not as great. This would also help with another idea I will discuss when we get to armor. In a best case scenario the field might even bend the beam completely around the ship and avoid a strike altogether. In another variation the electromag field could deflect incoming charged particle beams, including antimatter, and even material objects like shells, if they were of a metallic construction. It wouldn’t do much of anything to an uncharged beam, which is one reason they might be used.

Any other possibilities for defensive fields? Well, the light bending field might be used to confuse an opponent as to the exact location of the target, or a holograph projection might do the same. Or something can be suspended in the electromagnetic field to help it to deflect or attenuate the beam. I had originally thought of using metallic particles that could be formed into a screen around the ship, absorbing heat from incoming beams or breaking up the cohesion of particle beams. Then I read about cold plasma fields, and thought that might even be better. The idea of both is that the particles will absorb heat and rise in temperature, maybe even to millions of degrees. But that is heat energy that is not hitting the hull of the ship. When it gets to the point where it is radiating enough heat to become a threat to the ship (and remember, half the heat will be radiated out away from the ship, which is still a net gain for the vessel), the electromagnetic field could be switched off or used to move the particles to the back of the accelerating ship. Poof, it and all its stored heat is gone, more particles are released into the field, and we start over again. I think a powerful enough beam might still get something through onto the ship, but any decrease in what hits the ship is a gain for the vessel.

Last thought on fields. It might also be possible to fire missiles that detonate away from the ship and spread particles in the path of the enemy, also deflecting or attenuating beams. In the next section we will move on to discuss other methods of defense.

In part one of this entry I discussed the usefulness of beam weapons in far future space battles. While highly effective at short ranges their utility drops off as range increases, until they are almost useless at distances of a light hour, distances that fleets would prefer to at least initially engage at. The reason is that light beams can’t change their vectors when approaching a target that might be trying to avoid them. The farther the target the less likely they are to be where you aimed at when the beam gets there. We need something for long range that can change its vector onto the moving target. That leaves some kind of projectile weapon, a missile or a kinetic round of some kind. KE rounds, though packing a wallop, suffer from some of the same problems as particle beams. Unless they have some terminal maneuvering capability they can be dodged after they are seen. They might be hard to destroy, depending on how much mass they are carrying, but surely could be if the enemy was motivated enough to take them out. Smaller KE weapons, like cannon, might have an easier time hitting a target with a spread, but give up the hitting power of the larger KE weapon. They would again be best for close in combat, while the large KE weapon would be the ideal planetary bombardment weapon, and would be unsuited to ship to ship in most situations. Of course a terminal vector capability in larger KE rounds could have them maneuvering onto target, not inconceivable. That leaves missiles. Now if the missiles can be boosted to an appreciable fraction of light speed they become weapons due just to their speed. If not, or even if, they can be armed with massive warheads, fusion or antimatter, which can do a lot of damage. How much damage? Unfortunately for weapons tech, space is a vacuum, and any blast effect of a warhead will only consist of the mass of the weapon sent off in a sphere around the blast. Not much mass, especially as the matter is reduced as to the square of the distance. Most of the effects of the weapon would be heat and radiation, and again you need a fairly close detonation, at most a hundred kilometers, to cause much damage. Of course a direct hit could be devastating, and the target will be trying to avoid that at all costs. If the missile is traveling point nine light speed or above the warhead would almost be a useless redundancy on the weapon, as the missile would most probably shatter the target when it hit. Missiles could be sent at a target across a solar system, and would actually become more deadly the longer they boosted and built up velocity. A slow moving or close shot missiles would almost be useless, as it would be picked off by beam weapons or autocannon before they could close with the target. Of course the missiles could have all kinds of countermeasures that would be useful at a distance, holographic decoys, jamming, moving in evasive patterns, launched decoys that resemble the missiles, multiple separate warheads (MIRVS), even their own counter missiles to take out the target’s counter missiles. The speed of the missile, as mentioned, makes them deadly weapons as kinetic rounds. The faster they are traveling the harder they will be to hit, especially in a ECM loaded environment. You may only have a hundred thousandth of a second to acquire the correct target and blast it. Conversely, due to their speed they may only have the same infinitesimal time period to acquire and maneuver onto a target. And anything that gets in the way of the missile were surely take it out. On the other hand, even pieces of a destroyed missile could do immense damage to a warship. Read Niven and Pournell’s Footfall for an example of a situation where even if the closing object is vaporized the vapor will destroy the target. If the missile misses the warhead comes into play, detonating on closest approach much like AA missiles do today, and hopefully causing some worthwhile damage to the target.

Torpedoes are another weapon that is mentioned a lot in science fiction. But really a torpedo is just another name for a missile, using the connotation of ship launched weapons. Photon torpedoes from Star Trek are the most famous, though they have nothing to do with photons, and the scintillating energy around them seems at most a smoke screen, since they are nothing more than antimatter torpedoes. So what about energy torpedoes? Good question, but first we need to define what they are. Energy is simply fast moving matter (just as matter is very slow moving energy). It is a particle of some kind, electrons, protons, neutrons or something smaller. I’ve never seen a good explanation of just what they are, but maybe we’ll discover some new kind of energy that holds together over distances and makes a big flippin explosion when it hits something. It’s possible. Most engagements would probably consist of both fleets flushing masses of missiles at each other from distance as they closed to beam weapon range. Then they would fly past each other at high velocity while their beam weapons used the limited time to take each other under fire.

Now the last weapon I will talk about is plasma weapons. Just what are they? Plasma is a superheated gas, like that found in stars. Now we could probably heat gas to millions of degrees sometime in the future, but what kind of weapon would it make? Not so good, as far as I can tell. The ball of plasma would probably be very diffuse, and if not it would soon be as it spread out. Possibly it could be used as a close in weapon, but in space battles close in weapons are of limited utility. And if a hundred kilograms of superheated plasma hit a million ton warship it really wouldn’t put all that much heat into the target. It the heat was spread evenly over the ship it would cause a .1 degree rise in temperature. That’s right, .1 degree, and I think even my home AC unit could handle that. Maybe enough to cause local damage, but not ship wide. In some stories the plasma is held in a magnetic field that keeps it together and possibly even moves it to track a target. They almost never say what is generating that field though. Once it leaves the ship that source is out. Maybe if they have some kind of pod that trails the plasma it can continue generating the field, but it would also become a good target to stop the plasma. All in all it seems like a lot of work for little return.A good laser would seem to be a better investment.

Next installment will talk about possible protective strategies for these warships that are taking beam hits and being swarmed by masses of near light speed missiles.

Science fiction has portrayed all kinds of space warfare, most based on Earth naval warfare of one time or another. Despite what is out there, I really don’t think we’re going to see the future equivalents of men-of-war going broadside to broadside against each other (Star Wars), or a reenactment of the battle of Midway, with tiny fighters striking at massive carriers (Battlestar Galactica). So what will a battle in space actually look like, and what weapons and defenses will be used. Now in this blog I will be discussing ships and weapons of the far future. I don’t think we will be doing much more than shooting slow missiles and lasers at each other in the near future. So this will consider warfare in an interstellar age with some assumptions. One is that we will still have to obey the laws of physics, though we may be able to circumvent some of their effects, like inertia. And we will not have light amp weapons capable of going faster than light, so I will assume that most battles will take place at slower than light speeds. I have no idea how we will finally get around the light barrier, and if we even can. How we do it will have an effect on how we fight in that other realm, and I will eventually have an entry about those possibilities as well. But for this essay I will concentrate on fighting between slower than light vessels within a solar system, and the possibilities and pitfalls of different weapons systems that might be used.

First, a note on hiding in space. It is really really hard to do. Sure, you may be able to use light bending screens, which we are near to deploying today, to make the ship invisible. They might even be able to absorb radar and lidar and not show up on those systems. But ships with huge drive systems and powerful weapons have to generate a lot of energy, and they will radiate heat like small stars. Unless they have something between them and the enemy like a planet or asteroid they will be detected. I have some ideas on how to circumvent this detection that I will talk about in a future blog.

So let’s talk about beam weapons, starting with the favorite of science fiction that’s being developed for contemporary warfare, the laser. Lasers work by emitting a beam of coherent light, meaning that all the photons are the same wavelength. This wavelength can be visible light, xrays, gamma rays, or any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. On striking the target the photons are converted to heat energy, either melting, burning a hole or causing other mechanical damage, depending on the makeup of the target. On Earth lasers have captured the imagination of the military because they are instantaneous strike weapons, meaning that an almost immeasurable time passes from shot to strike. They cannot be dodged or avoided. In space, over long distances, they are not instantaneous strike weapons. In fact, they take time to traverse long distances, and they tend to spread from thin beams to spotlights over the distance. Lasers travel at the speed of light, 300,000 kilometers a second. Meaning if the target is 300,000 kilometers away the beam takes one second to reach a target that may have moved within that time span. And at longer distances the time is greater. At a light minute, 18 million kilometers, it takes the beam one minute to strike at where the target was one minute ago. With luck the target will still be there. And it will have spread so that it no longer resembles the thin beam it was on leaving the weapon. This doesn’t mean it useless, it can still pump damaging heat into the target. And traveling at light speed it can’t be detected until it actually hits. But over very long distances, say many light minutes, the laser is not a very effective weapon. By spreading the beam or firing multiple beams in a pattern the chance of a hit is increased, but the power of the weapon is attenuated if used in this manner. Another word about lasers. Sometimes they are portrayed as super weapons capable of destroying a good sized asteroid in one flash. Actually saw a movie where a fighter jet with an underwing laser destroyed an asteroid. Look up the energy needed to melt a cubic kilometer of rock, or to burn through a kilometer straight in and your jaw will drop. So I’m afraid that spaceships will be firing on each other for at least a measurable period of time to cut through hull armor, or pump enough heat into the interior to make the inside uncomfortable, then longer to make it unlivable.

Particle beams use the mass of a fast moving beam to impart energy into the target. Charged particle beams tend to spread over distance as the particles push each other away. And antimatter particle beam adds the explosive power of the antimatter to the damage, but have the same problem as the charged matter particle beam, in that the particles are repelling each along the way and the beam spreads. They can also be deflected by a magnetic screen, and the more spread they are the better the deflection. An uncharged particle beam doesn’t suffer from the spread problem and won’t be deflected by magnetic fields, but cannot of course be made of antimatter. And as all particle beams are traveling slower than light, they can bee seen coming in on radar or lidar, giving the target time to dodge. I think they will eventually be more powerful than lasers, able to cause much more damage to an armored hull. But the weaknesses will always be there. Over a long distance they will be seen coming, giving from many seconds to minutes to maneuver out of the way. But close in they could be deadly. Now other beam weapons might be possible, though we don’t know of any other possibilities at this time, with the possible exception of microwaves, which might fit in with the laser catagory. In the next blog I will talk about weapons other than beams.

I recently read an ebook on fighting, everything from hand to hand to pitched battles. The author did a very good job on it, and even though I consider myself a novice expert on military tactics and strategy, I learned some things. However, in one part she was very off the mark. The author stated that all battles are planned, and an obvious mistake was when a writer had two armies fighting it out by accident. It seemed that she had never heard of a meeting engagement, where two opponents blunder into each other and a battle is joined without prior planning. Now granted, many battles through history were planned affairs where two armies took the field at a predetermined time. In more modern settings, including the Napoleonic Wars, one side tended to plan an attack and would attack the side that wasn’t prepared. But we could still say that the battle was planned. The meeting engagement is planned by no one, but a fierce battle can still develop.

The most famous meeting engagement in American history is Gettysburg. Both armies were hoping to get into a fight, just not where they met. The vanguards of both armies ran into each other and a fight developed. The Union cavalry commander wanted to hold the ground, so he dug in. The rest of the armies came up in bits and pieces and were set out to turn the flanks that kept expanding, until, by the second day, there were two lines of troops facing each other. The story goes that Longstreet kept asking Lee to retreat and make the Union army attack him at a place of his choosing, in a planned battle. But Lee, a very aggressive general, decided that he couldn’t retreat, and so attacked an opponent that was superior to him in numbers and position.

There have been many meeting engagements in modern history, including multiple battle of maneuver on the Russian Front and North Africa during World War 2. Mobile forces are well suited to meeting engagements as they move across unfamiliar terrain and bump into each other in an oh shit moment of recognition. Then it’s a race to get the most to the developing battlefront before the enemy. I also think that most of the naval battles I have heard of were meeting engagements. Fleets normally blunder into each other before they’re ready. Some ships are hunting others, it is night, foggy, rainstorm, whatever, and they come out of the fog bank and there is the enemy fleet.

I plan to use several meeting engagements in Refuge: The Legions, when I have the force of NATO and the forces of the Empire marching toward each other with only a general idea where the other force is. Armies on the march, if they are well led, always have forces out ahead and to either side, both to scout out the enemy and to keep the enemy from scouting them. Often scout forces will try to route the other side’s scouts, fighting to gain information, and many meeting engagements occur this way. Now in fantasy there may be other ways of getting information on the enemy, such as aerial forces and magic. If using aerial forces like dragons or large birds, many of the things that caused consternation on mid twentieth century battlefields will also occur there. People may be hard to spot from the air under the cover of trees, or only can be seen when they are at river crossings. If an army is spread over an area of march a spotting may only give the most rudimentary location for the total force, and give very little information about their destination. And if magic is used the other side may use counter magic to give a false impression and a false location. So again the chances of a meeting engagement increase.

As said earlier, I plan to use several meeting engagements in the Refuge series because I think there is nothing more exiting in warfare than a complete fog of war situation in which both sides rush whatever they have into a fight with a force of unknown composition. The stakes are high, decisions have to be made in an instant, and reinforcements are not always sent to the right place. Sometimes the reinforcements are not sent to the right place but it turns out, with the direction of a good commander on the spot, to be the best place for them to go to. Battles have been turned on men going to the wrong place at the right time and rolling up an enemy flank. And they have been turned on regiments uncovering vital parts of the line like a blocker in football moving to the wrong place and allowing a sacker through. Like I said, exciting stuff and just the kind of series of scenes I like to write.

Coming soon will be a five part blog on what I think far future space warfare will look like.

I love wormholes. From the ones of popular fiction to the famous ancient created gates of Stargate. They are fascinating objects. Unfortunately, like many technologies used in science fiction, they are often portrayed in a very one dimensional manner. I remember several years ago on a science fiction and fantasy writer’s site asking for brainstorming about wormholes. I stated that I wanted to use them in a story as a well developed technology, and that, as such, they should have more than one use. I had already determined how I was going to generate them, using a big spinning black hole. Then the ends of the completed wormholes could be moved to where needed. I thought that since opening holes in space was an energy intensive process then something that created massive energy would be needed, unless I wanted to move into the realm of magic. So I needed ideas, and asked this site full of, I hoped, very imaginative people to come up with ideas I could use. The result? Not one idea past using wormholes to move people across space. One person even remarked as to why I needed any other use for the objects. I tried to explain that as a fully developed tech they would have found all kinds of uses, but the understanding of that concept was not there. I had already developed several uses myself, and after that exercise figured I would just have to work on the background with the one person I trusted to understand where I was going. Myself. So here are some of the ideas I came up for wormholes.

1. Moving people from one place to another instantaneously. I know, this is the function that most people think of when they think of wormholes. Depending on how they are set up, they could be gateways across the Universe or to the other side of the building. In my story worlds wormholes are expensive to create, not so much to maintain, so most gates are kept open. A variation of the passenger gate is the ship gate, which could accommodate large vessels and change the picture of interstellar commerce and transport.

2. Communications. Imagine that light speed in normal space is the barrier. Then ships as close as a million kilometers have an almost seven second time delay for two way communication. Imagine a miniature, even microscopic wormhole linking ships. The link might go back to a central base, then be rerouted to the entire fleet. Commanders would have instantaneous com with their ships, including video.

3. Heat sinks. Ships that are not working at one hundred percent efficiency would produce a lot of waste heat. They would radiate like small stars on the sensors of the enemy. A truly stealth ship could have a heat sink that sucks up waste radiation and transports it to an area where such radiation is absorbed.

4. Disposals. Just like for heat, but in this case for material objects. The exit hole could be place over the even horizon of a black hole or near a neutron star, for the permanent disposition of things that are dangerous, or that you don’t want to be found.

5. Resupply ports. Why worry about carrying the mass of all your fuel with you when you can port it in through the wormhole as needed. Or food, or any other needed disposable resource.

6. Weapons ports. Imagine a small warship heading into the teeth of an enemy fleet. And suddenly a laser or particle beam that would require a much more massive ship to generate comes out of the small warship. Only the beam actually came out of a wormhole port, generated by a much larger weapon sitting in orbit around a far planet. Or the ship fires missile after missile after impossible missile, all launched from another place and allowed to build up to near light speed before entering the hole on the other end and coming out toward the target the ship’s portal is pointed toward.

There could be endless other alternative techs once wormholes are commonplace. Mining, medicine, and manufacturing are just some of the realms where this tech could appear. Any readers of this post think of any others?

We’ve all seen it in the movies. The beleaguered humans are going up against something much more powerful than anything they have. They shoot their best weapon at the enemy, and there is either no effect (Independence Day), or the enemy is damaged but repairs itself (Star Trek TNG, the Enterprise versus the Borg). In some cases (Skyline) the enemy actually appears to be destroyed, but repairs itself. And the reaction of our heroes. Oh crap, we gave it our best shot and it didn’t work. We are so screwed from here on out. I call this the One Shot, One Kill paradigm of Hollywood. If the best shot doesn’t take out the enemy then it is time to panic, then come up with the super secret ultimate whatsit that will defeat the aliens. Or, in the case of Skyline, to just lose the battle. Wars on Earth would be so much different if we adopted this mindset for terrestrial foes. Imagine if a 120 gun man-o-war gave an enemy ship its fiercest broadside, only to see the damaged but still capable enemy vessel come through the smoke, and the captain and crew threw up their hands, made all possible sail, and took off for the horizon. Really wouldn’t make sense, would it? The commander of any military unit that made such a decision would deserve his court-martial and being busted out of the service. I guess the one shot, no kill, retreat scenario is Hollywood’s way of showing us how totally awesome the enemy, normally monolithic aliens, are as compared to us.

Now in real life one shot kills do occur, even in the realm of naval warfare. The Bismarck got in one good salvo that destroyed the Hood, only the couple of guys taking a smoke break on the stern surviving. The Arizona went up from one big bomb falling into the forward magazine. Though rare, such happens in the real world. What happens more often is that large weapons of war pound the crap out of each other until one submits or dies. Look at real battles between those old wooden men-o-war. They fired at each other with dozens of broadsides until one struck its colors or sank. The same Bismarck that sank the Hood emptied the magazines of several British battleships as well as taking a score of torpedoes before she turned turtle and sank. Even aircraft carriers with the deck filled with aircraft loaded with bombs and fuel took more than one hit to kill. The commanders threw everything they had at the enemy and didn’t quit until that enemy was no longer a threat or they didn’t have anything left to throw at it.

I remember the Star Trek TNG episode where the Enterprise made first contact with the Borg. A photon torpedo blasted a hole in the Borg ship and the Enterprise basically stood down and watched it repair itself. How interesting. I think a better strategy would have been to keep firing torpedoes into the damned thing before it repaired itself. Keep firing until the torpedo load out of the ship is gone or the damned cube is an expanding cloud in space. Hit the alien ship in Independence Day with one nuke and nothing happens. Keep on firing, you got plenty of the things. And ignore the idiot in the background shouting about hurting our planet when our planet is about to be stripped bare by the aliens. And the ships in the sky over LA in Skyline get knocked to the ground by a nuke (which should have been delivered by ICBM by the way, though it would have been much less dramatic). Don’t wait till they all repair themselves. Like a good fighter, hit them while they’re down, over and over again.

Sometimes they get it right. In Star Wars the big warships all kept pounding on each other until they couldn’t fight anymore. I remember watching the Battlestar Galactica mini-series, seeing the screen go blank from the bright glare of a nuke, and when the screen cleared the Galactica was still there. Damaged to be sure, but there. And I’m sure the Cylons would have lit her up with some more nukes if they had anymore in the region. Sometimes even Hollywood can write an intelligent screenplay and get it right.

I went to see The Avengers the day after the Tallahassee Writer’s Conference. I had seen the trailers on Youtube, heard the hype, hoped it would be good, and prepared myself for the disappointment that the movie would not be as good as hoped. And it Rocked most excellently. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, at least not to this comic loving boy who grew up on the lore of the Marvel Universe. There was no way they could make it prefect, and if I wanted to I could have sat there and picked apart every little mistake they made about the Marvel Mythos. And there surely were a lot of them. Instead I went to the movie wanting to see the superheroes I had grown up loving brought to life. And were they ever.

Nick Fury was actually shown as the action hero he was when he was an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., not just a desk sitting director. The flying aircraft carrier did not just have a bit part as I feared, but was an integral part of the story. There was the obligatory battle between Ironman and Captain America versus Thor, just to show that testosterone powers the Marvel Universe, and Thor was show to have true super strength in this movie, maybe not quite as much as the Hulk, but in that range. The battle between Thor and the Hulk was a gem, in which the big green guy was the stronger, though Thor got in his licks, and the hammer equalized them. I loved it when the Hulk was shown incapable of lifting the hammer. Only Thor could do that in the comics, and that was shown in a great manner in the movie. Otherwise the Hulk was shown to be pretty much unstoppable once the anger got going. Loki appeared to be much stronger than he was in the Thor movie, but that might have been because now he was dealing with mere mortals. One of the more humorous parts of the film was when Loki reviled the Hulk, calling him beneath the Asgardian God that Thor’s brother was. The result was predictable but still very funny.

Even Hawkeye was shown to be worthy of the mantel of hero, even if not super. The little automatic arrow head attaching quiver system was very cool. Black Widow had her moments, although as a mere human, no matter how good at martial arts, I still felt that she didn’t really belong in the Avengers. The big four of Ironman, Thor, Hulk and Captain America definitely belonged. I really wish they had put Giant/Antman in the movie along with Wasp, but I guess since they didn’t have their own movie Marvel thought they wouldn’t do well in this one. Or the special effects budget was already too high, so they left out the growth and shrinking effects.

One of the complaints I had read about this movie was that it didn’t have enough action. Now granted, it wasn’t all action, and there was some plain old talking conflict. But not enough action? No way. The movie started off, after the introduction of the villains, with Loki invading a secret SHIELD lab that is destroyed. There is a fight with Captain America and Ironman versus Loki, then a fight where Thor takes Loki and Cap and Ironman fight him. Then the battle on the helicarrier, in which Thor fights the Hulk, Ironman and Cap fight some thugs while trying to save the ship, and Black Widow fights Hawkeye. Then the battle between the Avengers and the aliens that had to run forty minutes or more. That was a lot of battle scene, and probably took most of the non-actor salary budget. But then again, some people are never satisfied. All in all I found it to be a very good movie that I decided not to pick apart for its mistakes, but instead appreciated for its triumphs. They set up the sequel, and I for one can’t wait for it. I guess I will have to, as it will be at least a year before it comes out. Maybe they will have a chance to introduce Giant/Antman and the Wasp in that time.